A startling debut memoir about sex, work and smack.A bookish,
piano-playing homebody, Holden grew up middle-class in Melbourne,
Australia. At college, her heart was broken, and she discovered
alcohol. She began reading (and dressing like) Anais Nin. She lived
in a trendy neighborhood, partied all the time and eventually tried
heroin. Soon, her life narrowed to three activities: getting money
for smack, scoring and shooting up. To finance her addiction, she
stole money from the bookstore where she'd worked for years; after
getting sacked, she began turning tricks, first on the street and
then in a series of high-class brothels, which are legal in
Australia. After only a few months, Holden grew accustomed to using
a pseudonym and having sex with eight men a night. The work was
degrading, but it had some glamorous aspects, ranging from velvet
dresses to the sensation of being "beautiful and desirable." She
felt genuine affection for some of her clients, though she had the
sense (most of the time) not to see them outside the brothel.
Eventually, thanks to her mother and to methadone, she got clean
and left the sex trade. Holden's prose is subtle and elegant. She
has a knack for unusual, revealing phrases, like "baffled by
weariness" or "the organized hauteur of the true professional." If
memoirists must make a choice between simply recreating the past
and editorializing about it, this writer chooses the former. Her
descriptions of the brothels are vivid, but there is something
disconcerting about her almost total refusal to interpret her years
as a prostitute. Early on, she acknowledges the debate about
whether sex work exploits or empowers women, bur she never weighs
in explicitly on either side. Too bad, since an analysis based on
firsthand experience would be worth any number of distanced
women's-studies treatises.Beautiful and discomfiting: The words
sing, but the singer never reveals her innermost thoughts. (Kirkus
Reviews)
Kate Holden's] road to recovery begins when she starts working in a
brothel. The clients seem to fit the same distribution curve -
brutish at one end, sweet at the other - but now that the trade is
coming to her, she draws strength from the power of her allure,
starts to take pride in her work, and discovers she's good at it.
This surprising trajectory, along with its searing intellectual and
emotional honesty and the quality of the writing, easily sets In My
Skin apart from most other my-substance-abuse-hell memoirs. - The
Independent on Sunday 21/05/06. Her vivid narrative voice lends a
gritty poetry to her tale of heroin addiction, half-hearted rehab
and prostitution. The book's power to shock rests in its contrasts;
the life Kate led during her 20s may have been unexceptional for
many young women, but not for a pretty, intelligent, middle-class
girl with a classics degree, a job in a bookshop and a loving
family of liberal, politically aware academics. She conjures with
glittering clarity the sense of invincibility that comes with the
first taste of adult life, the belief that drugs can make love and
art transcendent, the conviction that you are in control.In My Skin
is a compelling story of love and squalor that retains humanity and
sympathy. - The Observer, 14/05/06.
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